Your site is gone. Your words probably aren't.

First, find out what the archive actually has

1. Go to web.archive.org and enter your domain. You'll see a calendar of snapshots — every date the archive crawled your site.
2. Pick the last good snapshot. Not necessarily the newest: if the site was broken or defaced before it vanished, step back to a date when it was healthy.
3. Click through every page that matters. Home, services, about, contact — snapshots are taken page by page, so some pages may have newer or older copies than others.
4. Save everything out, today. Copy your text into documents, save the images that are yours, screenshot the layouts you want to remember. The archive is a public service, not your backup — treat this as the one chance to collect what's yours.

What recovers well — and what never will

Recovers well

• Your words. Service descriptions, about pages, the phrasing you spent years refining — text survives archiving almost perfectly, and it was always yours to take.
• Your structure. The page list, the navigation, the order you told your story in — a ready-made sitemap for the rebuild.

Recovers sometimes

• Images. The archive doesn't always capture them, and what it has may be compressed. Save what's there, but check your email, phone, and old drives for originals.

Never recovers

• Anything that lived on a server. Contact-form submissions, customer records, store orders, databases, logins. A snapshot is a photograph of the page, not the machinery behind it. If that data matters, the old host — not the archive — is the only possible source.

Get the domain back under your control before you rebuild

A recovered site pointed at a domain you don't control is a rebuilt house on rented land. If the domain lapsed, check whether it's still available to re-register; if it sat in a vanished developer's account, the registrar's recovery process is your route. Our domain guide's rule applies double after a loss like this: own your domain personally, in your own registrar account — never in a developer's, an agency's, or a defunct host's.

The rebuild: do-it-yourself or done-for-you

With your content saved and the domain in hand, the rebuild is a normal website project — arguably easier than most, because the archive already answered what pages you need and what they should say.

Where our flow fits — and the honest edge where it doesn't

Our recreation flow works from a live site URL: you drop the address, we rebuild what's there with your existing content and images on one of 6,600+ templates — $49 for the clean code, same day; $99 with 3 detailed revision rounds, standard 48 hours; $249 combining up to 3 templates with 5 revision rounds, hosting, SSL, and domain, live in 7 days. So plainly: if your site is still up — even limping on a host you're leaving — start the preview now, while there's a page to read. If the site is fully offline, the Wayback copy is your content source for a rebuild, but our free-preview flow has no page to fetch — save everything out first, and once any version of your site is reachable again, the flow works as normal. We also don't recover databases, store orders, or form submissions — nobody can from an archive snapshot, and anyone who promises to is guessing.

If your old site is still reachable, see it rebuilt before you spend anything: a free preview with your own content, as a real page you can edit and publish in one click, no credit card. Get the free preview →

Frequently asked questions